Examining The Waters

A closer look at the triangulations of Rick Blaine suggests the pretty blond isn't always the hero's motivation. 

In its final throes of death, roughly 1992 or so, the remaining drive-in theater in Oregon made a last-ditch effort to bring some light into our tiny little lives by showing four weekends worth of film noir double features. When the last reel of the current blockbuster finished and all the teenagers had driven off into the night to resume their clumsy fumblings, the promo cards flickering forty feet high would stop with the muffled thump of an audio channel being switched, followed by three hours of un-interrupted shadows, trenchcoats, and intrigue. At the time I was very unengaged with the style, as I felt things moved along too slowly, hardly anything burst into flames, and not enough information was spoon fed to me. With Casablanca, however, I was happily surprised to see Peter Lorre slimily oozing his way through his dialogue. I was familiar with Lorre from his catalogue of monster films, and didn't need to be told that his involvement could make a passable movie momentarily great. For two decades, Casablanca has stayed in my regular rotation of comfort movies, and eventually an urge came to solve a question that had always confused me: why did Rick come for the waters?

Not to drink them, that's what vodka is for.

You, by whom I mean Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, are familiar with the film. Some may be uninitiated, however, so for them: Casablanca tells the story of Rick Blaine, an ex-patriated American who owns and operates the most popular nightclub in World War II Nazi-controlled Casablanca, who inadvertently becomes re-entangled in a love triangle he thought long dead while simultaneously working surreptitiously to aid the Nazi resistance and keep himself out of prison. It is a famous touchstone film in our time, frequently misquoted and re-enacted in homage, but when released it was just one among fifty films produced by the assembly-line studio system of Warner Brothers. 

"Might be Bogart, might be Garbo. Hard to tell…"

The waters I referred to are addressed quite early in the film. Rick (played, as I don't need to tell you, by Humphrey Bogart before he was "Bogie") has just ejected a very lovely young woman from the nightclub and is walking back inside when he is engaged in conversation by the Police Captain, Renault (played by another of my spookshow heroes, Claude Rains). The camera sits a medium distance away, framing the two men in front of the nightclub but surrounding them in fog so that they feel removed from the background action. During their talk, a plane is seen and heard flying overhead on the way to Lisbon, mentioned as the first waypoint on the trip back to America. While Rick is denying Renault's charge that he desires escape back to the States, a searchlight appears and crosses the scene several times, returning when Rick speaks of his reasoning behind relocating to Casablanca in the first place. I don't know how deeply one digs into these things to find symbolism, but an expatriate reminiscing while a searchlight peers into the fog doesn't seem terribly subtle. I can also easily imagine the more innocuous spotlight-running stagehand, an hour after lunch, forced by his bladder to stay in motion because he didn't leave enough time for a rest stop before work resumed. 

So much fog, the original footage came out looking like 2D cell animation.

Rick explains to Renault that he came to Casablanca "for the waters," a poetic notion which Renault scoffs at, as they are in the Northern region of Africa where "there are no waters." "I was misinformed," Rick replies. The tale is clear: he's been used up by life, forced to rely on bad information and bouncing from place to place in an effort to find any safe harbor to live quietly and stay drunk. He'd been done wrong and left to rot, with not a friend in the world to call on for help. I still think it's masterful writing and character development, but I've since discovered that Renault was inexcusably stupid and Rick was either equally ignorant or (as I assert) deliberately lying his ass off, and I think I've discovered why.

There are only two concrete things that can be known about Rick based on the information provided in the film: he both ran firearms to the Ethiopians and fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War before arriving in Casablanca. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War would be chronologically first, and Rick's involvement in running guns there means that he was helping to supply Emperor Selassie of Ethiopia with the outmoded and obsolete firearms that directly caused their decimation in the war. They were vastly outgunned by the Nazis, and if Rick was the one to put them in that situation, he surely bears a personal responsibility in the subsequent Nazi victory. Ethiopia had fallen by 1936 and Rick had to flee, traveling north to engage on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (which, coincidentally, was the same thing George Orwell was doing at the time) and fight in the losing battle against the Francoists.

Francisco Franco, seen here at an auction bidding on a chin.

Following these back-to-back defeats, Rick fled in the opposite direction as the bulk of the refugees (who were heading en masse to 1939 France, what luck!) and made his way to the North African country of Morocco and the Vichy/Nazi-controlled Casablanca to open an expat nightclub acting as a front for the rebellion directly under the Nazi's comical noses. Now, I am not inclined to argue the logistical nightmare it must be to keep a handle on money and possessions whilst traveling across half the globe to engage in the losing end of two battle theaters, then presumably liquidate your remaining assets to purchase a nightclub. I am more interested in arguing against the popular interpretation of Rick's motives in helping his former love Ilsa and her new companion Lazlo escape Casablanca to continue the resistance, or at least refining it with a more keen instrument.

The popular position is that Rick, who originally resisted aiding Ilsa and Lazlo to escape when they first arrived in town, changes his mind when he gains a better understanding of why his relationship with Ilsa ended. Originally it seemed she jilted Rick, but she later explains her relationship with Lazlo came first, and she had only been with Rick because she thought Lazlo had been killed. This news is supposed to have softened Rick's heart, we are told, as his anger is supposed to have originated with her unannounced departure. I argue his decision was made based on a motivation to regain control over some aspect of his life, ensuring that his desired outcome was the result.

Nicely summed up here.

Rick is an anti-fascist and a man of the people, if his popularity in the community is any reliable metric. He seems to desire, generally speaking, the fostering of celebration and the potential of the celebration to cause money to change hands at his establishment. He tried to supply weapons to aid the Ethiopian resistance to fascism, which directly cause their loss. He again tried to help the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and was again on the losing side of the conflict. I argue his every waking moment in Casablanca was torture by dull knives, living under the constant shadow of his failures and the potential to have everything taken away by the Nazis. In ensuring Ilsa and Lazlo's escape from the fascists, Rick was undertaking the first resistance-based action for which he could personally guarantee success. Once the final airfield scene of the movie arrives, Rick personally moves the story forward at gunpoint, seeing to it that every critical step in the escape is accomplished in the narrow window of time allowed before the Nazi reinforcements arrive to keep Ilsa and Lazlo's plane from takeoff. Alone, Rick could never have accomplished supplying weapons to the entirety of the Ethiopian army or single-handedly defeated Franco's troops, but I think we have all met an individual who is easily capable of personally shouldering the failure of an endeavour they could never have prevented solitarily. I propose Rick saw enabling the escape as an act of absolution, knowing he could no longer fight personally but could instead immeasurably aid those who could still fight while giving his Nazi town leaders the finger. 

Since we've got this lying around…

"The waters," I argue, can be seen as the thirst-like need to resolve what once went wrong. The single-minded need of which one never needs reminding and the fulfillment of which is capable of overriding our primary preservation of well-being. Surely this need will be different for each of us, but writing into the script either Rick or Renault's explanation for their motivations would be pointless, as any map will show they cannot be trusted. "The waters?" Renault scoffed. "There are no waters in Casablanca." Casablanca is situated directly on the coast of Northern Africa, you see. The waters are everywhere.

It looks quite lovely, actually.

Today's Example of Why Science Will Outlive Superstition

The refutation of Bicep2's announced discovery illustrates the ease and comfort with which the scientific community ingests and adapts to new information compared to religious organizations.

Just following the Ides of March of this year, researchers from the BICEP2 installation at the South Pole publicly announced the finding of a very specific variety of polarized light in the cosmic microwave background. This light is thought only to be produced by interaction with gravitational waves produced by the accelerating expansion of the universe in the slimmest subsection of time following the Big Bang. The announcement was quite monumental, ultimately suggesting that a previously-unexplored and incredibly exciting area of physics known as the idea of grand unification could be better understood in our lifetime. My clumsy and bearskin-clad effort to explain the unbelievable magnitude and majesty of what a unified theory and evidence of faster-than-light speeds would represent is profoundly and embarrassingly unrefined. I highly recommend individual understanding of this topic, as it is more awe-inspiring that any alternative I could list. Unassociated scientists were publicly optimistic, though all provided caveats regarding the need for peer-review and a confirmation of the findings. The staff of BICEP2 reportedly waited a year to announce their findings, in an effort to apply due diligence to their research, and finally felt comfortable when the Keck Array installation (a new post in the same spot) showed the same results. 

Test for colorblindness or a picture of gravity waves? Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

Attention faded, as it does, and soon the excitement of a Unified Theory receded to a tiny table in the back corner to drink coffee and catch up on Stephen King. The plausibility of the findings and their revolutionary potential was still a topic of debate, and I had the pleasure of listening to a group of people much smarter than myself discuss the subject. One person in the group was very convinced, and his attitude could best be described as "proceed as if true," but even he happily provided caveats regarding the ultimate need for more information.

Today the Washington Post carried an article quoting Uros Seljak, a physics and astronomy professor at UC Berkeley, as saying there is still a question regarding the source of the detected polarized light. There is a chance, Seljak contends, that the received signal could have been produced by the interference of dust in space situated much, much closer to Earth than the edge of perceivable light. This is similar (again, in a clumsy and indelicate fashion) to taking a flash picture outside at night and seeing a pinpoint light source in the picture as if someone was standing fifty meters away with a flashlight. The light source is actually a particle in front of the camera, reflecting light from the flash back into the lens, but one could be forgiven for the confusion. The question should be decided later this year, when the Planck Space Telescope takes a more refined "picture" of the visible sky in multiple frequencies and with a much finer tolerance for differentiation between dust and a physics revolution. 

There is no tolerance for seeing this and thinking "ZOMG, ghost orbs!" Idiot.

The finest point to take away from BICEP2's announcement and the associated debate is the overall world view that allows for such an effortless and non-defensive incorporation of newly-discovered information tempered by the need for independent verification, the closest thing to a chiseled-in-stone commandment you're likely to find in this community. There may be personal embarrassment involved in working diligently on a world-changing project, then having to face the idea that you may have been so excited you were tricked by space dust, but regardless of the outcome there will be no honor killings. There will be no excommuncations from the church of rational thought, no proclamations of heresy leveled by both sides, no resulting schismatic split leaving us with Fundamentalist Science and Hip Young Reformed Science. The information will be measured on its merits, the evidence considered with multiple sets of sober eyes, the results based on fact. Science and the secular community around it is the only game in town if you prefer facts over superstition and reasoning over faith, which is exactly the set of tools best suited to aid us in understanding the actual universe of which we are a very real part. 

That would be us, on the right.

Since beginning to slog and wade its way out of the thickly-encrusted Augean stables that is religion, a labor which has yet to reach completion due to no conveniently diverted rivers in the area, science has repeatedly shamed and outpaced religion when both are confronted with a new development in our primitive understanding. Unable to simply wait around until flaccid holy men can get drunk enough to have a serious argument about nothing at all, science regularly and without undue stress has undergone reformation, using the process of discovery and reason to incorporate verifiable knowledge such as the effects of gravitation and heliocentrism. Religion responded to this approach to the world with condemnation and death sentences, a childish and ignorant recitation of their primitive and phenomenally wrong holy books, and an arms-crossed refusal to embrace logic which persists and has regrown immense strength in our time. 

Again, pictured on the right.

BICEP2's reported findings and their detractors are, quite literally, discovering and debating over what may be the single most important astronomical discovery in our lifetimes, with incomprehensible ramifications to every single aspect of our tiny little lives. And they are doing it without the vitriol one would expect if exposed to what we laughably call modern news and religious debate, with absolutely zero danger that the debate will result in any kind of split in the community. There is, quite literally, no way for an evidence-based community such as the one I describe to have a fault wherein these kinds of schisms have their genesis. Differences of opinion or of conclusion are resolved by the presentation of fact, those facts being the result of experiments and evidence and peer-review, none of which any religious community has the slightest time for.

Divine Jurisprudence

The divine has never known what it was talking about, and even the most devoutly religious never really cared.

Religious people never follow the rules. Rules are, to someone with respect for civilization and their fellows humans, ubiquitous in almost all circumstances.  These are in place, for the most part, to try and ensure the general well-being of the majority of the community. They were approved, enacted, and exercised by humans as a self-regulating group, a cornerstone of the most basic concept of society. Failure to abide by rules carries punishment, ranging in severity based on your age and the nature of your transgression. Children can expect loss of privileges or the equivalent of house arrest, whereas adults get a range stretching from financial sanction to incarceration, penalties which enact a consequence on the transgressor and potentially act as a deterrent for others. Regardless of fluctuating police and prosecutorial success and the current popularity of state-sanctioned execution in different regions of the country, a certain group of people have always and will always decide that they are personally exempt from the law and act accordingly. The motivations for defying societal laws can be mental illness or garden-variety antisocial behavior from assholes, but in all cases humans defying other humans can be rationally understood. What cannot be understood is the willingness of humans who consider themselves pious and faithful in all other respects to openly defy the direct commands of the creator of the universe on punishment of eternal torture and suffering. The bizarre methods and inconsistencies in heavenly mandate cry out for an examination of the sweetest low-hanging fruit our current triumvirate can offer, as it is both impossible to find a single worthwhile edict that secular society hadn't already provided or any proof that the religious take their celestial obligation at all seriously.

"Never actually opened it, why do you ask?"

The Pentateuch contains the first five books of the Old Testament and therein both the 613 Talmudic laws and both recitations of Moses's Top Ten which I intend to address, as well as two disparate accounts of creation within the very first chapter. The only thing different interpreters can agree on regarding the origins of these five books is their heavenly creation by the hand of God in the time before time began, but there is wide disagreement on the physical state of said books and the effect of God's Bookshelf on the principle of creatio ex nihilo. How the Pentateuch changed hands from God to Moses is another matter of debate. In one account Moses ascended to heaven to take them from the safeguard of angels, casting a negative light both on God's omnipotence and the quality of angel-based home security systems. An alternate recitation of the story is that God was shopping his books around the various cultures living at the time and got no takers, save for the Israelites. Once this selection of the "chosen" was completed, so the story goes, the revelations were sent forth into all lands and translated into all languages, which is a bit like God getting engaged but still telling everyone he's single should the opportunity to trade up come along. Of late, the far more reasonable "documentary hypothesis" suggests that the first four books were compiled from four geographically and culturally separate sources and modified over time, before being falsely attributed to the wholly manufactured figure of Moses.

Sexy like He-Man, and exactly as real.

The 613 Talmudic laws, or mitzvot, were extracted from the Pentateuch and compiled by the Rambam Moses Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah shortly after the first millennium to act as a complete statement of codified Jewish religious law. Despite opposition from contemporaries, Maimonides' text became and remains a companion to the Talmud and an unassailable arbiter of judgement. The vast majority of the laws, as one would expect, are common societal injunctions against theft, perjury, murder, grudge-keeping, and mistreatment of the young or elderly (all of which will be quickly disregarded in Deuteronomy when the seven Canaanite nations need slaughtering). Less pleasant is the ghastly injunction to circumcise (found twice), or the need to take a special bath (Lev. 15:16) if a Jewish male should be unfortunate enough to be sullied by the touch of anything icky (Lev. 11:29-30), a dead animal (Lev. 11:39), a dead human (Num. 19:11-16), a leper (Lev. 13:2-46), or -- worst of all -- a menstruating woman (Lev. 15:19-24). What is not explained is what the celestial creator's abnormal fascination with male children's genitals or his attitude towards women, which is parallel with the "girls are gross" hardline my friends and I took on the playground, has to contribute to the betterment of society. Or abiding by the stupidly vicious command to whole-heartedly take on the burden of holding an unremitting grudge against the Amalekites found in Deuteronomy, or the same chapter's allowance for the use of a woman (including for sex) until she no longer pleases her captor, provided she is not made a slave, or the stunningly removed and nonsensical decree from Exodus "to break the neck of the firstling of an ass if it be not redeemed." I cannot even imagine what would be involved in the redemption of livestock, but I am certain it is not the subject of conversation at any bar mitzvah. Knowledge of how to understand instructions removed by two millennia notwithstanding, a whole swath of exhortations involving Temples, sacrifices, and criminal procedures literally cannot be followed because they are predicated on a completely theocratic state of Israel.

You know the sound that's playing.

The inappropriately-named decalogue is related at least twice, but for purposes of this tirade I will focus on the very familiar appearances in Exodus and again in Deuteronomy. In part one, God speaks to Moses and the assembled company in an audible voice in one language and dictates ten edicts, at which point everyone except Moses left, allowing more rules to be inscribed with no witness to their divine origin. Then comes the return from the mount, fantastic party, golden calf, Moses gets miffed and deliberately destroys the only physical representation of his savior in existence, because piety sometimes takes the form of a pretentious child. Smash cut to slightly later, Deuteronomy's Moses can't get these goddamn kids to stay off his lawn and so hauls the whole rigamarole out again, trudging his imaginary self up and down the hill to re-carve the direct and unchallengeable edicts from almighty God from memory like a shopping list that fell out of his pocket on the way into the store. History and convenience may have reduced the muddled nonsense this imaginary tribal leader rambled off to a comfortable and familiar ten, but in both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 there are fourteen cruel commandments that could only have been written by the fiercely tribal minds of the time. In any case, again we see how even the most esteemed of religious leaders doesn't take divine instruction seriously, as a quick reading of the two different installments will show that the latter group has been re-written and modified to further highlight God's supremacy over other gods (which would seem to completely contradict any argument for his "one true" status) and to persuade children to treat their parents kindly in exchange for longevity. Modern treatment further spits in the eye of the celestial spoken word by adapting the commandment's sensibilities to fit in more easily with people's need to live their lives and perpetual fondness for shiny things. The commandment forbidding people from aspiring for a better life casually groups and equates servants, cattle, and women as property only gets quoted in abbreviation, either to shift the focus to inanimate property or to come to a full stop after mentioning thy neighbor's wife, nicely truncating the problematic and less-flattering slaves and work animals. The jewelry seen most often on Sunday morning and the majority of stock in every Abbey gift shop I've ever seen would be a direct shot in God's chops if not for the Catholic liturgy's amendment and casual repudiation of the commandment regarding graven images.

A souvenir of the torture device that killed your savior, graven in any material you like.

The Qur'an follows shortly thereafter, and leads with some throat-clearing by way of a pre-emptive explanation regarding its clumsy plagiarization of the holy texts which preceded it. All three works were crafted by the same divine hand, goes the diminutive reasoning, and therefore it is to be expected that the same story is told. Islam, figuring the third time will be the charm, takes this unprovable pretension a step further by claiming the Qur'an to be the final and unchallengeable revelation. This is very much like Jim Henson filming the La Choy Dragon commercials and then, when the topic of pre-existing European and Asian dragon mythology inevitably arises, saying: "Obviously they're similar because we all got the idea from the same place. It's just that mine is the only one that's correct and no one else is allowed to make dragons from now on." The Qur'an was verbally relayed from God to Mohammed via the archangel Gabriel over the course of twenty-three years. After getting the first few chapters out Mohammed relocated to a settlement he called "Medina" and began the construction of an entirely Muslim community, whereupon Gabriel stepped up production and began delivering laws and behavioral restrictions unto his new community every day. With the benefit of hindsight you can anticipate the problems Mohammed the prophet would have had, since the benevolent archangel Gabriel had not seen fit to reveal every contingency to Mohammed before sending him to forcibly establish a totalitarian bedroom community in an already-occupied settlement with people who were wondering out loud why their town wasn't called "Yathrib" anymore. Upon his death, Mohammed's cohorts gathered his writings together, made their own little additions and alterations, and stamped it as the final revelation. 

"Nailed it!"

Accompanying this are the collective hadith, supplements to and clarifications of the Qur'an used as teaching religious texts, which are not the "direct" writings of Mohammed but the secondhand accounts of his opinions, declarations, and actions. Individual hadith have their value to Islam debated based on the relative merits of the chain of narrators through whom it was supplied, and currently no proscription is more publicly contentious than the required punishment for apostasy. There are several instances of Mohammed's mandate and requirement for the death of non-believers, the exact wording of which changes depending on whose translation you're reading, and several passages can be found which seem to call for compassion instead of the sword (albeit the kind of compassion one reserves for watching a freshly crushed snake wriggle its last on the highway). In practice, the only real point of contention among Islamic schools of jurisprudence is whether or not to give the accused the called-for three days of confinement to consider recanting, because the only way to make your religion more tissue-paper flimsy than bellowing that anyone who doesn't play along will die is threatening death and handing out do-over cards. The death penalty is called for by not only Mohammed, but more contemporary hadith as well as Sunni and Shia imams whose names you would recognize, for a failure to adhere to any one of the five pillars of Islam. Nowhere in sight is the sweetly quaint sliding scale of Catholic penance, or the guilt-riddled Hebraic Ten Days of Repentance. The public execution of apostates is intended to make the Islamic model of civilization the global victor by virtue of all the opposition being dead or too stricken with fear to protest, an idea that directly negates one of the most fundamental cornerstones of actual, grown-up civilization. Modern Islam not only makes no pretense of shame or any effort to obfuscate the final hard line it draws, instead making their violence against peaceful communities and individuals an embraced point of pride. 

Clearly, despite divine inspiration, ostensible authorship by disciples closest to the given prophet, and being the direct command of the non-thing being these people claim to know as the creator of the seen and unseen, challenging and redefining the holy edicts based on your personal interpretation and geographical coincidences is remarkably commonplace. It's almost as if the direct orders and -- one assumes -- benevolent heartfelt wishes of God are more like easily ignored guidelines, seeing as Christianity alone has had more than a dozen schisms since the Council of Ephesus in 431 C.E., which will henceforth be referred to as the First Annual Jesus-Con. The Assyrian Church sent Ephesus all a-flutter by kicking heresy square in the balls and moving straight on to the schismatic behavior of referring to Mary as the "Birth Giver of Christ" instead of the approved "Birth Giver of God," because divine omniscience had really meant to clarify that but had gotten sidetracked during the regretful little bit with the floods. What separated a juicy schism from a more tame heresy had to be defined and clarified 106 years previously at another clash of the intellectual giants called the First Council of Nicaea because, again, divine dictation is nothing if not loaded with wiggle room.

All this. All the time.

Since the first millennium, the Catholic Church has happily accepted money paid over and above the tithe by its parishioners as protection against a loving and just God. The justification for and lascivious intensity of which fluctuated over time but has always been a well-regarded standing order from the Pope, who used his smarm and position as the one infallible physical manifestation of God to skirt the unfortunate detail that the aforementioned perfect and divine overlord had once again forgotten to clarify the point, sadly neglecting to include anything in his unchallengeable and unquestionably perfect revelations about the sale of indulgences to haul people's dead relatives out of the less-nice waiting rooms in purgatory, and into something with a pleasant tile floor and maybe some magazines. This was the wholesale practice of sticking up the helpless, with the added pleasure of knowing your congregation was powerless against the idea of Grandma suffering in the afterlife because no one would here would cough up some shekels. Those indulgences paid entirely for the reconstruction of Saint Peter's Basilica after it had fallen into slight disrepair due to casual neglect around the end of the fifteenth century, because Rome was absolutely filthy with Late Renaissance-style churches at that point and no one could really be bothered to sweep and dust every couple days. Trading money for salvation was big business, and since there was no commandment not to (which could then be gleefully ignored or re-written) it proceeded until a huffy faction who were equally full of themselves posted a Dear Pope letter and a giant middle finger in the center of town. Luther and Calvin kicked Mother Church square in her desiccated ovaries, then barely took a moment to celebrate this whole Protestant Reformation thing they had stumbled onto before turning to infighting over the finer points of predestination vis a vis free will and salvation.

Rumble in the Jungle it was not.

Saint Augustine of Hippo kept the New Testament "divinely inspired" fan-fiction train running, pushing the idea of limbo for unbaptized infants as an academic solution to the hilarious and unforeseen problem of original sin sending newborns to the same eternal reward as people who rape and kill newborns. The claim of divine inspiration might as well have been one of typical arrogance, coming as it was from one primate telling another that he stands between all the primates and the unseen authority. God was evidently fine all along with the fate of infants, as he felt no need to include a revelation speaking to the baptismal conundrum despite his aforementioned omniscience. Augustine only advanced his provincial and backward form of cruel nonsense because a fellow -- and much finer -- thinker called Pelagius was telling people horrifically subversive and irresponsible things like "Adam died of old age," or "It's possible for people to do good things without celestial reward or punishment," and the most heretical cry of revolution: "There is no need to attempt to drown your newborn child."

"Is this about the Legos?"

The Torah was verbally dictated, except when it was directly written by Moses, and has evolved from a brutish and cruel origin to a much fuzzier and friendly-looking exterior today. Sometimes the directives are attributed to God, sometimes to Moses, but until any archaeological evidence can be produced that indicates either being is real it is safe to assume Old Testament death mandates are entirely a product of the wills of early tribal leaders. This penalty applies to false prophecy (which should reasonably include all religious groups which are not Hebrew), mastery over ghosts (which may or may not include exorcism), gaining information from the deceased (ostensibly aimed at mediums, although I argue we could include reading a book or, in fact, praying for guidance), the rape of a married woman (no problem if she's single), incest, any form of physical love that isn't completely boring and devoid of any passion, or rebellion of any kind against one's parents. Oddly enough, bar mitzvahs are not celebrated for their rarity, perhaps because killing a child for rebelling against their parents is a remarkably stupid and self-defeating way to build a society.

The Qur'an claims to be the perfect and final revelation of God, but incorrectly re-tells Hebraic legends, has entire post-revelatory redactions in the form of the Satanic Verses, displays in its morally regressive logic a stunning kind of ignorant single-mindedness that would offend in any epoch, fosters a tribalist attitude to the unbelieving infidel, the all-too-familiar proprietary treatment of women, and the ghastly promise to its young men that they will get more sexual slaves (or maybe grapes, God wasn't too clear on that point) if you will only kill as many differently-minded people as you possibly can in the course of your own suicide. All of this points to shitty stories stolen from the distant past and attributed to someone who was, by any account, an illiterate and malnourished desert dweller who was suffering from impossible-to-diagnose seizures that were perhaps responsible for him thinking God was talking to him.

I propose none of this is necessary, and even my too-small brain can trace a line past these archaic and detrimental beliefs. If your holy texts are the word of God, fine. With that comes some baggage. If you belong to the more Western flavor if Islam, but don't ascribe to the killing of apostates as commanded by Mohammed, in what sense are you a Muslim? There is no religion without an eschatology calling for active participation in the utter destruction of the human race in order to bring about the end times and whichever Second Coming-ish apocalyptic fist fight you prefer, but zealots who appear to be fervently pursuing these goals are not hailed as religious heroes by the greater community. There is no revelation allowing for the challenge of these dictates, all of which carry equal weight in terms of importance. Since all the dictates are equivalent in regard to celestial obedience and eternal reward, on what authority can anyone not strictly follow every law to the letter while still retaining their place in the (presumably correctly selected) congregation? If any one law may be disregarded at will, what need has the group for a supervisory entity? Since no participant in any religion makes any honest effort to follow the laws as written, why claim both the dictates and the imaginary consequences that come with them? God is unchallengeable, yet his faithful and obedient animals challenge revelation all the time. God is infallible, but tells different stories to different people and always leaves out more important things than are included, leading to endless confused and nefarious revision until we're left with centuries-removed oppressive fairy stories taken more seriously than the world we all share. Human beings are perfectly capable of living good and proper lives without hurting each other solely on the basis of innate morality, therefore it would do us all a great deal of good to move past the adoption of imaginary rules that carry very real consequences.